What Does Jeremiah 6:5 Mean?
Arise, and let us go up in the night, and let us ruin her palaces.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Arise, and let us go by night, and let us destroy her palaces.THE KEY
The word for “destroy” also means “corrupt,” joining the plan to ruin the palaces with the condition of being ruined from within.
THE MEANING
You hear destruction become a shared, deliberate plan: they rise, choose the cover of night, and name the palaces as their target. The verse speaks plainly about violence, without softening what they intend to do.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This verse undoes the belief that violence is always a sudden eruption: here it is chosen together, timed for darkness, and directed at a specific target.
THE ROOT
וְנַשְׁחִיתָה
wenashchitah
GROWS FROM
שחת
to ruin, destroy, or corrupt
The verb rendered “destroy” grows from שחת, a root that also names corruption. The same seed connects an act of ruin with the state of being spoiled, so the verse’s planned attack carries an echo of something already corrupted.
ALSO GROWS
shachat: to destroy, ruin, or corrupt
שָׁחַת
This verb appears here as an intended act of ruin and elsewhere describes corruption itself.
mashchit: destroyer; one who brings ruin
מַשְׁחִית
This related form gives ruin an agent, showing how the root can describe both the act and the one carrying it out.
THE PATTERN
Destruction takes shape as intention: a plan forms, a target is named, and harm is set in motion.
Hide me from the huddle of evildoers; from the rumble of the workers of crookedness.And letters were sent by the hand of the runners to all the king's provinces, to destroy, to kill, and to make perish all the Jews, young and old, little ones and women, on one day, the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, the month Adar, and to plunder their goods.The thief comes only to steal, and to slaughter, and to make perish. I came that they might have life, and have it overflowing.THE THREAD
The earth also was ruined before God, and the earth was filled with violence.The Hebrew verb translated “corrupt” shares the שחת root with “destroy” in Jeremiah. The echo joins inner corruption and outward violence through the same seed.
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